On January 21, 2019, the French data privacy agency, CNIL, fined Google nearly $57 million for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). According to French regulators, Google failed to communicate to users how their personal information is collected and to obtain user consent before displaying personalized ads.

On January 4, 2019, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California upheld a jury’s findings that Apple, Inc. infringed two WiLAN patents related to wireless communications technology. However, the judge reduced the damages award recommended by the jury from $145.1 million to just $10 million.

On December 29, 2018, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois granted Google’s motion for summary judgment and dismissed a lawsuit concerning biometric data privacy for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. The case began in March 2016, when Plaintiffs Lindabeth Rivera and Joseph Weiss alleged that Google’s cloud-based facial recognition software violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by storing users’ biometric data without consent.